As companies migrate from a centralized to a distributed computing environment, the administration and management of security policies, in particular authorization policies, is becoming an increasingly difficult task. This paper considers the design of an authorization system that is suitable for distributed applications. It discusses the architectural design principles, describes the constructs of the authorization policy language amd outlines the authorization service and components involved. The paper gives some example policy specifications and illustrates how privileges are specified and evaluated as well as how privilege resolutions are achieved.